Multilayer bus bars and bus boards (hereinafter referred to as “multilayer bus boards”) have been routinely employed in electrical devices for power and signal distribution and take many different forms. Some bus boards known in the art employ a laminated construction in which conductive plates or layers are insulated from adjacent conductive layers by a dielectric layer disposed therebetween.
In one known construction, a multilayer sandwich is encapsulated in a solidifiable dielectric medium. Apertures are provided through the encapsulated structure and conductive pins or posts are driven through the structure so as to make electrical contact with, and electrically interconnect the stacked conductive plates. Such a structure is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,133,101. Other encapsulated multilayer bus bar and bus board structures are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,977,777 and US Published Application 2014/0185195. A method of forming a molded condenser is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,871,492.
In certain applications it is desirable to make connection via a pin or terminal to one or more conductive layers of a multilayer bus board without making conductive contact with other layers of the multilayer bus board. In one construction in which the bus board is formed as an alternating sandwich of conductive and dielectric layers, openings are provided that are oversized in relation to a pin that will extend through the bus board and an insulating donut or sleeve is disposed in the opening prior to lamination of the layers to form the bus board. These dielectric layers are typically film based with epoxy based coatings that are used as bonding agents to the multiple conductive layers. When the pin is urged through the bus board, it makes contact with conductive layers that do not include such a sleeve and is insulated from layers containing such a sleeve. In these type of constructions epoxy coated dielectrics are typically covering at least most of the complete conductive layers because of the need for mechanical strength. This coating can restrict heat dissipation that is needed in certain high power switching circuits. Assembly of a multilayer bus board in this manner involves selective placement of the insulating sleeves within specified openings of the conductive layers. This procedure as well as setting times of the epoxy based dielectrics can be time consuming in the manufacturing process, costly and volume restrictive. It would therefore be desirable to have a bus board and method for producing the same core construction that allowed for high volume production, permitted interconnection of terminals or pins, was able to be designed to allow for heat dissipation, able to add features of topography for locational and mechanical holding and add dielectric insulator via holes as needed without added parts to selected layers of the multilayer bus board.
These prior art systems typically use metal powder coating or epoxy based lamination insulators and additional insulators in the form of inserts to create pass through channels for conductors to get to the adjacent layers. The lamination process to put this all together is similar to lamination of PCBs, and take up to 40 minutes to an hour for the lamination process. The end product can be bent and formed but is featureless with regards to locaters, bolt-throughs, etc.
To avoid high inductance, bus conductors need to be electrically balanced so that current flows equally and in the opposite direction through each adjacent conductive sheet. When so connected, their opposing fields will effectively cancel each other. The closer the conductors are together, the greater this cancellation effect. Therefore, the dielectric material selected should be as thin as possible while still having a dielectric strength appropriately in excess of the application voltage, resulting in little added circuit inductance. Closer, thinner, and wider conductors are the key to reducing total circuit inductance getting maximum performance. Another prior art approach is just to put two copper sheets in a molding process and hold them apart an allow plastic to flow between them. This approach may be insufficient for today's technology as the industry requires very thin bus layers. Thin gaps between the opposing potentials with high dielectric between the layers keeps inductance low as switching speeds rise. Larger spacing and thick bus layers generate higher inductance as with the laminated approach.
There is also a growing need to move to very high temperatures (greater than 250 C) because of the higher chip temperatures, however many current lamination materials have trouble at higher temps, which creates additional problems to solve.
With power density growth, multilayer bus board assemblies need to become more compact. There is a need to connect subassemblies within various power assemblies and modules in a mechanically condensed and electrically efficient manner. High voltage assemblies up to but not limited to 1200 volts need opposite polarity conductive planes between subassemblies that are compact, deploy shapes and location features so that subassemblies and parts can be nested together in one assembly with one common power plane. In the application case of high power switching circuits like insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) these power planes need to support high capacitance with low inductance so as not to cause overvoltage which would adversely affect switching speeds.